The road leading to Sherry Berger’s 21-year career as executive director of Choice’s Pregnancy — a career she recently retired from at the beginning of the year — began with a car wreck.

It was January 1983 in Kansas, and her husband lay near-death in a hospital bed after a man hit him in a head-on collision. Doctors had told Berger her husband wouldn’t survive the injuries he sustained.

Berger went to the hospital’s chapel, a dimly lit room with a few chairs, a cross, and a Bible. She wasn’t a religious person — after not being raised in a Christian home, she “had a distorted view of Christians,” she said. “I thought they must be very bored people if they had to go to church instead of having family time on Sunday.”

But she was desperate. She and her husband, Jerry, had just begun a family — he had recently adopted her three kids.

“I just sat down and broke down,” she said. “I said, ‘God, if you’re real, please don’t take my husband. We’re just now a family.’”

Then she felt an embrace.

“I physically felt arms grab me and hold me from the back,” she said. “And a sweet, sweet peace just filled my body. And I knew then, there was something more than me here, and God up there.”

That day, Berger did something she had never done before: She believed.

After her husband survived the accident, her faith grew even stronger. And two years later, Berger was saved.

For Berger, that marked the beginning of a Christian life that has seen her save countless lives and change countless others through her work at the pregnancy center in Russellville.

The pregnancy center — which counsels both pregnant women considering abortion with life alternatives, as well as post-abortive women — began in 1991, when she helped open Choice’s Pregnancy in Russellville after meeting a woman named Maggie Simmons at a right-to-life meeting earlier that year. With Maggie having lived in the area for 35 years, and Sherrie’s knowing of the protocol for starting a center, the two complemented each other perfectly.

The center opened in August 1991, and Berger had no clients their first day — at least, none who walked through the center’s doors. But that night at 10 o’clock, her 14-year-old daughter came to her crying. She said she was pregnant.

“We were just totally shocked,” Berger said. “I just couldn’t believe it until I had seen it myself.”

Berger took her to the office and conducted a pregnancy test. It came back positive.

But the pregnancy was a blessing in disguise.

“We walked through what it was like to have a 16 year-old pregnant, what it was like to be in school. With her friends, when you take the responsibility of pregnancy seriously, your values change, your focus changes off you and onto your baby. So her desires of what to do in her spare time was different than most of her friends. So they went one way, and she found herself alone.”

This perspective allowed Berger to bring a unique empathy to the job, which often involved counseling mothers who were scared, alienated or in many cases, both. The result has been a rewarding career that has seen many babies who might’ve been aborted now leading successful lives.

“Some of our babies who were slated for abortion are in college right now,” she said, citing two teenagers as an example. The boy “had just graduated from high school, and his goal was to reach as many people through Christ as he could,” she said.

“Those were just two lives of thousands who have come through that ministry and have been changed because the Lord established it,” she added.

While Berger is personally against abortion in every case, she doesn’t speak to prospective mothers with an agenda.

“We don’t browbeat or force anything on these young people. If we did, we would’ve been closed many years ago,” she said. “But what we do is talk to them about the procedures and risks of an abortion, and then we offer alternatives to that. We help them to see those physical, emotional and spiritual ramifications that they need to be aware of.”

But earlier this year, Berger felt the strain of her family’s health problems, and decided to retire.

“I felt the Lord say, ‘It’s time,’” she said.

But she is excited about the leadership that Christy Renfroe, the new director, will bring.

“One of our board members put it this way: ‘Sherry, you have birthed this child, and walked this infant, and now Christy is coming to nurse this adult that the ministry has become,’” she said. “That could not have been any more accurate.”

As for Berger, she will have the memories of a fruitful career.

“This is just my story,” she said. “Every employee there, they have stories that the Lord has blessed them with.”